


Not Much

by Thorns_And_Sunsets



Category: None - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Short Story, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2018-12-23
Packaged: 2019-09-25 12:08:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17121074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thorns_And_Sunsets/pseuds/Thorns_And_Sunsets
Summary: A small establishing vignette of one of my latest characters and leader of a spy branch, Aequis.





	Not Much

**Author's Note:**

> Reuploaded from my old account because I am one of the biggest idiots around

He wasn’t much to look at, truth be told. Painfully average in almost every way, with a mess of brown hair and knowing hazel eyes, his build hovering on the line between slightly built and nondescript, and everything down to his nails was something you’d see on every other man that walked by you on the street.

 

At least, that was what he wanted everyone to see.

 

Behind closed doors, behind the curtains of the night sky, behind the grand oak desk he kept as one of the only furnishings of the room beneath an old man’s storage unit, that man was made out of things to be looked at. His hair was still messy and brown, but the dim light of dying torches lit it up with a pretty, honeylike hue, and while his eyes were still round and hazel, there was a sharpness that made its home in them. Something that could look at a man and slice through his very soul, dissecting his every thought until everything that could be learned about him was laid out in front of the average man like a book ready to be read. And, now that he didn’t have to hide himself? That man was covered in tattoos. Ink murals snaked their way up his arms, one telling a story of a man who drowned at sea and the other whispering snippets of what happened to a woman who was visited by her angel, and his entire back was broken and layered in ink of many, many colours, almost as though he were touched by a massive paintbrush that made distinct images even as it was lashed against his body. His legs, his stomach, his sides, everything from the neck-down was decorated in the most ornate way that he had managed, and down in the earth where barely anyone came out of, he could show himself as he pleased.

 

He stayed down there for hours upon hours every night, those smart, observant eyes barely seeing anything even closely resembling another human, and even when they met such a sight, that poor person usually seemed...well, terrified. Their terror often only grew the more this man spoke, whose wouldn’t? He told them everything. Everything about themselves, everything that he should have had no way of knowing.

 

“And is this about your husband?” He’d asked one woman - a pretty girl, young, blue eyed - as he lifted himself off that desk and idly thumbed the shelves that lined almost every wall in his little hideout. “Or about your child? He ran away, didn’t he?”

 

He’d watched as she stuttered, faltering under his gaze. It was bored. His expression, that was. It was bored, because he had seen that reaction a thousand and one times before. The shock! The fear! The cliche! He’d grown bored of it, and could anyone really blame him? He was asked how he knew things at least five times each day, threatened with death a little less than that, and every now and again he’d be met with complete silence.

 

Ah, he loved the silent days. They were almost refreshing.

 

In the end, the woman was there to cover her own tracks- not that he didn’t already know that she was behind the disappearance of her teenage son, but he’d given her the benefit of the doubt. ‘Inentional misleading’ is what he called it. Others called it having faith, but Aequis didn’t have time to sugarcoat himself, not when he had so much to learn, not when he had to uncover a million secrets a day.

 

Thankfully, there was little Aequis didn’t know.

 

At that point, he knew almost everything that he needed to know in order to rise up in the ranks of the world. He knew the past crimes of the Pope, he knew the spending habits of the president, he knew that there were at least two thousand police stations in Europe alone that were merely fronts for gang activity - granted, he had only been awakened to this due to his sister marrying a mafioso, but the rest he’d found out himself - and he knew, very much so, that everyone had secrets. Undoubtedly, whoever knew about him knew that none of their secrets were safe. They had heard whispers of his sister, and they talked about her in their grand halls while sipping the wine they didn’t know was poisoned, fearful in the posibility of her lurking around nearby (she never was, she merely did her job and ran for the hills like any sensible assassin ever did), but the case with him was that they heard screams of his name. People screamed about him, yelled warnings, told their friends and family to hide the dirt that they’d gotten on their hands, and Aequis could hear them, He heard every single little thing, for he was always there. No one feared for their life at the mention of his name, so why would anyone look for him? He wasn’t anything much to look at. He was just a man, with messy hair, pretty eyes, and a perfectly normal life. The only difference was that he heard everything.


End file.
